Diablo III Archives - Page 33 of 33 - Tales of the Aggronaut

How Diablo Ought Be

October 27, 2013 by Belghast

Hibernation Weekend

This is one of those mornings when I really wish I did not have to write a blog post. I guess in the grand scheme of things… there is nothing forcing me to do so, but I would hate to break my streak of daily posts. This is one of those hibernation weekends when neither my wife or I really want to leave the house. In fact I went out and got breakfast in my fuzzy slippers that look like shoes this morning and a hoodie. Not like the folks at the convenience store really pay too much attention to what people are wearing, but it was a reasonable facsimile of “dressed”.

Yesterday I was completely all over the place game wise. I started off the day by playing quite a bit of Hearthstone, this was a side effect of me wanting the gold from my daily quest and a new friend just getting into the game. Once he got through the tutorial and unlocked a few decks we played a few games. The first game he trounced me liberally, and the second two I managed to pull ahead significantly mostly due to him not getting the cards he needed when he needed them. Playing against actual players has made me extremely aggressive when it comes to Hearthstone, and I am not really sure how to tone that back a notch.

Mixed Bag of Gaming

After hearthstone I poked my head into Rift for a bit, but really didn’t find much enjoyment there. I am not sure what it is but right now Rift is just not that fun of a game for me. I am sure before long I will cycle back around to it and it will once again be the next best thing to sliced bread. I have the same sort of thing going on with EQ2 as well. I have a desire to play some, but when I actually log in I have no desire to do anything. So in both cases I poke my head in and then log back out almost as quickly.

Right now I am still enjoying Allods quite a bit, but I have a feeling that very soon the bottom will drop out. I have heard that after a certain point there are very few non-group quests. Currently at level 8 I am still having no problem at all, and this is sufficiently scratching that World of Warcraft itch. However I get the sense that I am nearing the end of the starter city of <Insert Russian Sounding Name Here>. I am really enjoying the game, and it is extremely well crafted, but as a whole the storyline and missions are forgettable. There is really little “special” about the game other than the awesome soviet era steampunk feel.

Forced

After a bunch of mucking around yesterday, I settled into playing a brand new game with some friends. Forced had been a title that popped up on our radar during the Kickstarter, and was subsequently picked up as a Steam Greenlight title. Well it has officially released this week, and one of my friends decided to buy a four pack and distribute copies. They describe the game as Diablo meets Left4Dead… and to some extent that makes sense. However I do not think that description really explains just how much cooperation is needed to make it through the levels. In many ways it reminds me of Gauntlet Legends… if Gauntlets Legends required you to use the NES Rob the Robot to make it through the levels.

Each of the gladiators chooses a weapon that will dictate their active and passive talent trees as well as set the overall flavor of the arena combat. Above you can see an image of three weapons in the preparation room leading into any of the arenas. I am currently holding the magma hammer and all of the attacks both passive and active are somehow fire based. To the left of that pool is the green daggers, most of the attacks being about speed, stealth and health regeneration. In a way they are the support class in that they can generate combo points on the target than the heavier hitters can then consume. On the bottom left you have the Ice Shield, and this is the tank of the group focusing on being able to negate large amounts of damage. Finally you have the D&D Animated series style lightning bow, with chain lightning and energy based attacks.

How Diablo Ought Be

The controls are also extremely unique… or at least unique to me. In many ways it reminds me of Ikari Warriors in that you have one set of controls to move your body and another to control your facing. If you choose mouse and keyboard this means that WASD will move you physically around the arena and your mouse will choose your facing with Left and Right mouse buttons being your primary and secondary attacks to start out. Later on you will pick up additional attacks Q being the first of these. I assume with a controller one stick is likely your movement and the other your facing with your triggers being your primary attacks, but quite honestly I have not tried this out.

The pace of the action was so intense most of the time, that I quite honestly forgot to hit the screenshot last night. However the gameplay revolves around using the glowing sphere of light Balfus your “spirit mentor” to move around the arena and active switches and traps for you. As a team this gets super tricky since you have ONE balfus and each of you can call it at any given moment… so this involves a lot of communication to figure out who can use it next. Additionally if your timing is right you can position the next person to call it as soon as one objective is done. It is hard to fully understand how the gameplay works cooperatively without seeing it in action. So as a result I am going to embed the trailer that shows quite a bit of play.

Challenging Co-Op

So essentially there are so many ways to fuck over your friends while playing this game. There are maps for example where Balfus provides a protective bubble, and if you stray outside of that bubble you take large amounts of damage per tick. So these force your team to be placed JUST right as you pay your way through the map. It becomes progressively easier to abandon a player on the edges of the map and trap them. So for us… access to voice chat was SUPER handy. We kept communicating and I was generally the dullard that tried his best not to ever call the ball. My job was to call down orbital strikes in the form of meteors upon the heads of the big baddies and consume combo points with my heavy hitting attacks.

You get a crystal for each objective that you complete. On each map there is a completion shard, a time based shard, and one for getting a specific objective. They have made these in such a way as it is super difficult to get all three within one run. So as a result you can do each arena over and over to try and gain as many crystals as you can. Last night in our little 2.5 hour play session we managed to rack up 15 shards. The first world was honestly rather straightforward but as we entered world two… the frequency of cursing increased massively.

Downright Brutal

Face it… you are going to be seeing a lot of this screen. The game excels as forcing various no-win scenarios if you are not fast enough or clever enough to figure out the trick on the first attempt. We would have probably continued on for another hour and a half had one of our players internet not taken a massive dump. At that point we figured… it was a good place to take a break. The gameplay is extremely frenetic, but also amazingly rewarding when you and your friends manage to complete a scenario. If you too have a group of friends to game with… I highly suggest buying a four pack and distributing copies because forced provides an extremely unique gameplay experience for multiple people. As a whole I give the game a big thumbs up.

Early Access Zombies

September 27, 2013 by Belghast

Minor Renovations

Awhile back I decided to change out the Raptr widget I had embedded in my sidebar that showed the last few things I had played, to something more manual. I have always loved the feeling of the Steam library grid view, with its cool little preview images. So for my “Now Playing” section I strived to create something similar feeling. I think for the most part it works, but it is now a much more manual process as I have to create an image and then add it to my sidebar. I feel however that the results are worth it.

I had been wanting to do something different with my blogroll for a bit, but I was not really sure what I wanted to do. I am a very visual person, and even though I read most of the blogs in my RSS reader, I still think of them based on their visual appearance. The idea I came up with was making similar preview images for all of the blogs on my blogroll to give potential readers a flavor of the blog before even clicking through. I still have several more blogs to add to it, but I think the end result is really nice. Once again it is a much more manual process as I have to take time to create an image for each blog before I add them.

Blogrolls are one of those things that people tend to ignore in their own blogs, but for me it is a resource for someone to find other good voices. As a result I like to take care in trying to make sure my blogroll represents what I am actually reading. When pouring over this small change I did notice that a large number of the blogs on my roll were just not posting anymore. As a result I have pruned the list quite a bit, and will add to it as I notice people starting back up. Additionally I added a new section for “Gamecasts” since it is a mix of video casts and podcasts. I still need to add quite a few things to this list but it is a solid start.

Console Diablo

Recently I downloaded Diablo 3 again and gave it a spin trying to get back into the game. While I found elements of it enjoyable I also remembered all the things that frustrated me about it. I have come to the point where I just cannot stand the “click to move” mechanic. It just “feels wrong” for lack of a better term. I think in many ways this is the one thing holding me back from truly loving league of legends… I just can’t stand the control mechanics. When I heard Diablo 3 was coming to the consoles, I was initially not all that excited… but the other day I noticed that a PS3 demo existed. I figured what the heck, no better way to test and see if I like it.

It appears that all of my problems with the game stemmed in some way from the horrendous control scheme. With a controller, the game felt fresh and new and extremely enjoyable. Granted I only played a little bit the other night, and only had access to the Barbarian, but I had a blast. It made me remember just how much fun I used to have with Diablo in the first place. I am not sure if I am quite ready to shell over 60 bucks for the game on the console… but I can see myself picking it up sooner or later.

What I really want however if for them to patch in controller support for the PC version. This is the version that has the characters I want to play, and the friends I want to play with. I have a perfectly amazing XBOX 360 controller hooked to my PC that I use with more console friendly games. Essentially everything about the game was better with a controller. It is like they took so much more thought and planning into the user interface design as a whole. So please Blizzard… patch in controller support at least when you release the expansion. It makes everything about your game feel better.

Early Access Zombies

Back on September 20th Undead Labs released their extremely awesome open world zombie survival game… State of Decay as part of the Steam Early Access program. I picked it up shortly after but did not really have a chance to play it until last night. If you remember when this came out on the XBLA I raved about it for a long while, but really have not played it as much as I would like. One of the problems I have playing consoles is that it disconnects me from my group of friends. There is a large circle of us that hang out on mumble every night, and I have yet to find a really viable option for hanging out and chatting on mumble while playing the consoles in the loft.

Last night I happily fired up Mumble and then popped into the game. It feels as though the overall gameplay experience has tightened quite a bit. The Early Access candidate is in essence a beta test, and Undead Labs wants to make sure players know this while playing the PC release. Currently the client only has support for a controller, but they plan on eventually adding in mouse and keyboard support. Quite honestly I would rather they do this than half ass it like some of the other console ports like Force Unleashed.

The game is super responsive, and I can run it comfortably on maximum resolution making the client look so much nicer than the XBOX 360 one I was used to. I really hope they add in multiplayer co-op. This game just screams for it, because exploring this world with your friends would be so much more enjoyable than doing so with what are essentially scripted bots. I have no idea how long the game will be in this “beta” state on the PC, but everything about the title is at least as good as the XBLA client. So I would not hesitate suggesting the game to anyone. If you like zombies and you like fallout style open world exploration… this game is for you.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this up and get up and around. I have a conference to attend today, and also need to make a trip to the cleaners… so I need to give myself as much wiggle room for finishing getting ready as I can. I hope you all have an excellent weekend. Ours looks like it is going to be super rainy. For those curious, my mom is recovering well and I am not sure if I mentioned this or not… but so is Lethbridge. Spoke with him last night and he is in a lot of pain after his surgery but doing okayish. He was in FFXIV for a bit last night playing the game one handed… which I guess is a good thing that a g600 can do.

Bad Launches

August 26, 2013August 26, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people… it is the beginning of another work week and I still feel sore as hell from the weekends adventures. The odd thing is my thighs are killing me… and I am guessing it was from all the random times I had to squat down to take a shot throughout the wedding festivities. I still need to sift through the photos and cull it down to a final set of “wedding pictures”. As I just reached up to scratch my forehead… it appears that the sunburn is starting to peel… so I have that itchy mess to look forward to over the next few days.

Pre-launch Problems

The above animated image pretty much sums up my experience with the weekend pre-launch of Final Fantasy XIV a Realm Reborn. Essentially I got to play a bit before the wedding madness started on Saturday morning, and then at almost every point afterwards I received some form of an error trying to log in. Essentially I think all of the issues encountered can more or less be chocked up to the poor infrastructure we have seen at various points during the other tests. Almost everything about this weekend could have been reconciled if they had the forethought to include an actual login queue system.

Sure there is a sort of queue that exists, but the highest number in queue my friends and I have seen is somewhere in the 400s… which leads me to believe that the queue is limited to something ridiculous like 500 members. This leads to the very fun process of spamming a character login only to get the ubiquitous 1017 error stating the world is full. That is hands down the most frustrating part about the whole experience. It seems like complete blind luck as to whether or not you are going to make it in.

Bad Timing

Ultimately another large portion of the failure that was the FFXIV head start, was the fact that they were holding it entirely over a weekend in North America. Normally pre-launches begin on a Thursday night and continue on through Friday… at which time they can begin to see what the scaling issues are going to be like and adjust accordingly. Holding it on a weekend essentially means that all infrastructure resources in North America are closed for the weekend. I feel as though if they could have thrown a few more servers at this issue a lot of the problems would have been resolved.

Instead the game team and infrastructure resources are operating on a significant time lag. An example is that Sunday evening… at what would be 8:30 am Japanese time… they managed to stabilize the JP servers. As a result I was finally able to roll a character on the Japanese network of servers and at least spent a little time before going to bed playing around on Ultima. My friends think that this morning we will see the EU/NA servers stabilize similarly. I still question whether or not they actually care about customer service, but that is part of a much larger issue.

Bad Launches

So far this is probably the worst game head start I have experienced. Normally when a game launches, we get a few blissful days of stability during the head start as only the pre-orders get to play… and then can chill out for the first day as the servers burn around us knowing you already have characters that are pretty far into the game. Quite honestly this is the first time that I can remember ever experiencing large periods of not being able to play the game at all… during a head start weekend. Lots of head start experiences have been riddled with lag or other issues… but the game was at least partially playable. During the entirety of the weekend I got roughly 2 hours of gameplay.

One of the things I found interesting however is that while talking to friends over text and mumble… I did not realize just how subjective a launch experience was. For me I herald the launch of Rift as quite possibly one of the smoothest I had experienced. However talking to one of my friends… he remembers tons of issues during that launch. This lead me to crawl back through my forum posts and blog posts from the time… and I literally found no mention of any issues brought on by the launch. Did I just not notice the issues because I was enjoying myself… or did I really not experience the problems that he had made note of.

So this makes me wonder… how many of the bad launches I have experienced are purely subjective? For example, I considered Guild Wars 2 an extremely solid launch since it was playable for me the entire time… albeit I spent most of that time on the overflow shards. However the simple fact that we could not really play on our “real” shards made it an extremely frustrating experience for certain other players. Do they consider that launch a failure… whereas I consider it a pretty solid success? Additionally I struggled with massive amounts of lag during the SWTOR launch, but my friends consider that to be one of the more successful launches to date. It felt like a rocky start to me, and as such I got extremely frustrated by it.

King of Bad Launches

So far the two worst launch experiences I have played under are both from the same company. World of Warcraft has gone down in history as the rockiest start. I can remember the game being more or less unstable for a solid month. I remember almost always being able to connect to play the game… but functionally the server side lag made it next to unplayable. There were times I could level without issue… so long as I never attempted to loot anything I did not already have in my inventory. Likewise the launch of Diablo 3 was essentially an unplayable mess for the first few weeks and constant error codes. I had far less forgiveness in me around that launch, because after the rocky wow start… they should have had better preparations in place for another blockbuster success.

The thing is… at the launch of WoW more or less the gamers dealt with not being able to play the game… because it was in so many ways leaps and bounds ahead of what else was currently on the market. It was “worth” waiting for. I feel like companies simply do not have the luxury of time to fix their problems. I posted a complaint about the Final Fantasy launch over on G+ and immediately people brought up the failure that was Diablo 3. Gamers tend to hold a grudge against the games that floundered and while some of them will develop a short memory and return to your game happily once the issues are resolved, there is a certain percentage that will never again trust your company.

With these catastrophic infrastructure failures… I feel as thought Final Fantasy XIV has roughly a weeks time to fix everything and get the servers in a relatively permanent state. The roughest part is the fact that this is occurring during the pre-launch and we are not even seeing the final launch day crowds. Right now every one of these frustrated players has the opportunity to log into amazon, or green man gaming and cancel their preorder. I know of a handful of players who have done just this. The rough reality is that other than the Final Fantasy diehards, the title is just not good enough overall to make the masses wait to play it. There are way too many other games on the market, and many of them without the subscription fee.

Wrapping Up

Here is hoping that the next few days see massive improvements in the stability of Final Fantasy XIV. Right now I am extremely disappointed and this probably goes down as the worst pre-launch I have experienced. The next few days will determine if it can compete with Blizzard for the worst launch category. Hopefully they can throw enough hardware at the problem to fix it quickly. I hope you all have a great week, and that you were able to get in more playtime than I have to date.

Fear the Reaper

August 22, 2013 by Belghast

Hey look, it is morning again… and once again time to push random thoughts into Live Writer. I wish to god I knew what the hell was up with my sleep patterns. Last night I started attempting to go to bed around 8:30, but I still tossed and turned and woke up half a dozen times. I feel slightly less zombified than I did yesterday… but it is still not that great. I am beginning to suspect this is all thanks to my friend allergies, and then fact that I have been stuffed up for weeks. Maybe tonight I will try taking some Benadryl before hitting the sack.

Elder Subscriptions

Yesterday I wrote a rather long ramble about how the subscription model is something I am only wiling to pay these days, if I am really committed to a given game. I provided for an example the fact that I would be more than willing to pay a monthly subscription fee for the Elder Scrolls Online for example, whereas I simply am not for Wildstar. At the time of writing the post at 6 am… I did not realize that at 4 am that same morning it was announced that ESO would in fact be a subscription based game, and be charging something along the lines of the standard $15 a month “wow rate”.

The thing that I am comforted by is the fact that they seem to understand that for a subscription fee you have to give a kind of “premium” access. In the age of free games being really good, and easily accessible… you cannot simply allow players access to your game for the monthly fee. You have to sell your players on a service… that you will provide regular updates to them for free as part of that monthly commitment. The original interview that announced the information leaked a handful of details to this fact.

30-Day Free Time when you purchase the game, and then a monthly fee to play.
$14.00 / €12.99 / £8.99 per month.
Discounts for setting up multiple months at a time.
Game card support.
Promise: new content every 4-6 weeks.

The last part is going to be crucial. So many game developers have promised regular content updates. Some of them deliver for awhile, and then taper them off over time. Not to pick on them… but The Secret World was supposed to have monthly episodic releases… yet a little over a year into the game we have had 7. Granted there are multiple mitigating circumstances, namely the loss of most of their staff… but still very few companies have ever actually delivered on the promise of regular content updates. To the best of my knowledge the only two that have really excelled at it are Trion with Rift and Arena.net with Guild Wars 2.

Elder Scrolls promises to provide us a massive game world to explore, with two decades worth of land mass… literally every area we have ever explored in an elder scrolls game. But we all know that there will be a string of players that has burned through every inch of that content in a single week of playing. The success of this game will be to provide a constant stream of updates, and at a frequent enough pace to keep the players always engaged in the game and not gobbling up content in a purely episodic manner. That is the problem I currently have with The Secret World, the content is infrequent enough that I stop playing while waiting on the next “issue” to release… only to come back and gobble it up and then leave once more.

I feel like the trick that Elder Scrolls has up its sleeve that we are really not even fully capable of wrapping our heads around.. is that fact that it will be a fully fleshed out MMO experience launching on a console. Currently DC Universe Online is the best “MMO” experience that console gamers have, and at the end of this month Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn will be joining it. However both of those are limited to PlayStation 3 players only. ESO will be launching on both the PS4 and XBone and will be adding a completely different dynamic to the sink or swim equation.

Elder Scrolls in general is already massively popular among console gamers… so it will be interesting to see just how many of them are willing to pony up a monthly subscription fee to continue that experience. To me it feels like the console market is relatively untapped territory… and it could be the thing that ultimately pushes ESO over the top. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth among the PC gamers that we would be getting a watered down experience since ESO would be launching on the consoles as well… but I look at it in a completely different light. If we want regular content delivery… we ultimately want Zenimax to make as much from this game as they reasonably can to keep funding constant development time.

It will be interest to see how this all plays out in the end. I have been shocked at just how civil the discussion has been on the Bethesda forums. Sure there are a handful of doomsayers explaining how that ultimately this will lead to the end of Elder Scrolls as we know it… but the majority seem to be taking the announcement of a subscription model well. Normally that forum is a wretched hive of scum and villainy… that is known for its completely outrageous demands. My hope is this is a sign of how the Elder Scrolls community as a whole will take the announcement. Ultimately this is the community that Zenimax has to lock down as far as a subscriber base, not necessarily the roaming community of nomadic gamers.

Fear the Reaper

Another surprise from Gamescom yesterday was the announcement of the new Diablo 3 expansion… Reaper of Souls. What is so surprising about this to me… is the fact that Blizzcon is only a few months away. This is the type of announcement I expect Blizzard to hold in reserve for their own convention. This does however provide them a little bit of momentum and building anticipation as they move towards November. I will admit… this cinematic had me dusting off my Diablo 3 account and playing some last night.

Like many of my friends… I ultimately lost interest in the game once I finished the main storyline. We beat the game and then retired our characters completely. For me at least it has always been a problem with the click to move control scheme. However thanks to regularly getting coaxed into playing League of Legends… it feels a little less foreign than it did… and as a result I rather enjoyed playing my little monk last night. Overall I was a much bigger fan of Torchlight 2 than Diablo 3… but returning to it now it feels better than I had remembered.

Ultimately my one major problem with the game still remains. I hate the fact that I have to play on their servers, and as a result have to deal with server lag while playing essentially a single player experience. Most of last night things were going peachy… however there was one moment when I died due to a massive lag spike and went from full health to dead almost instantly. This is at the end of the day the most damning strike against the game. There should still be a “Lan” mode… even if you have to dial home every so often to save character data… the bulk of the interactions should be happening independent of the server.

I still feel like a complete sucker, that a pretty trailer got me to break out a game I had not played in over a year. I have always been a fan of the blizzard cinematics, and this is no different. They always manage to tell a compelling tale for whatever they are choosing to show. Overall I really don’t much care for the design of Malthael… but he does seem sufficiently creepy to carry the role of bad guy for another Diablo 3 chapter. WoW Insider has a rundown of the features… that include:

A new Crusader class, wears heavy armor as a tank, buffs/debuffs friends and enemies, not unlike Diablo II’s Paladin
Reaper of Souls will officially by Act V of Diablo III
Level cap raised to 70
Paragon level cap removed
All classes will get new spells as they progress to level 70
Something called a "multilevel Legendary item"
Substantial updates to the loot experience, "Loot 2.0" as named by Blizzard — you’re more likely to pick up items tailored to your current class
Overall loot reduced, not picking up as many items not needed by your current class
New Crafter: Mystic — re-roll stats on items, gives chance to create better gear
Two new endgame modes/activities: loot runs and Nephalem Trials

My hope is that the overall experience is far less forgettable than Diablo 3 was for me… and this will add features to the game that make me want to play it more often than you know… once a year.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap things up and head into work. Yesterday we got the new washing machine installed and I was able to do the loads of laundry that had gotten wet and soured due to the flood. Things feel like they are mostly back to normal. At some point we need to rent a carpet cleaner and try and get rid of the massive water stain in our bedroom, but that can be done later. The rest of my week will be focused on getting read for the wedding I have to photograph on Saturday. I hate weddings… so here is hoping that sitting behind the lens of a camera will make it less heinous. I hope you all have a great day, and I hope your weekend is going to be far less busy than mine.